2011 - 2014: BiG project - Studying language knowledge and processing in bilingualism
- under construction -
2004 - 2009: BISLI project - Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in a multilingual context
Collaborators: prof. dr. Anne Baker, drs. Nazife Cavus, dr. Jan de Jong and prof. dr. Fred Weerman
The research project 'Disentangling bilingualism and SLI' (NWO grant 254-70-010: BISLI) was conducted at the ACLC, University of Amsterdam. The project studied the acquisition of Turkish and Dutch in successive bilingual Turkish-Dutch children, who were diagnosed with SLI. The project had two levels. The PhD level (my part) aimed at investigating the Dutch output (children's L2) of the children. The post doc level carried out by Dr. Jan de Jong aimed at investigating the Turkish output (children's L1) and cross-linguistic influence. Also, the BISLI-project collaborated narrowly with the NWO-project Variation in Inflection (members: dr. Elma Blom & dr. Daniela Polisenska)
An advantage of testing two languages in the same child is that the heterogeneity inherent to SLI is reduced. In addition, the clear typological contrasts between Turkish and Dutch were helpful in teasing apart language-specific and impairment-induced influences.
In my part of the project, I aimed at specifying the relationship between SLI and bilingualism. In so doing, two common groups of accounts to SLI - 'representational accounts' and 'processing accounts' were related to bilingual acquisition. The linguistic variables under investigation were the following: Dutch finite verb placement & inflection within the inflectional phrase and Dutch gender agreement (as marked on definite determiners and attributive adjectives) within the determiner phrase.
Teasing apart the effects of SLI and bilingualism in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children with SLI requires reliable data sampling and comparison. The data of that specific group were therefore compared to data of bilingual unimpaired Turkish-Dutch children, and monolingual Dutch children with and without SLI. Data collection in all groups took place with the same experimental set up.
My dissertation can be found at http://www.lotpublications.nl/index3.html
